Open any fashion magazine these days and you would think that our cities had turned into giant catwalks. Street photography, as celebrated in last year’s charming documentary about Bill Cunningham – the New York Times snapper who took pictures of real people wearing their own clothes to stylish effect – has been co-opted by bloggers and blaggers. Their flattering portraits, or unflattering celebrity pap shots, suggest that we are all stars merely waiting to be revealed under the gaze of their artful lens.

A fascinating new exhibition at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery by Swiss artist Beat Streuli seems to hold up a more candid camera to our daily lives. He came to prominence in the Nineties, and this collection of his photography and video is his first big solo exhibition in this country. Like Cunningham and the granddaddy of photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson, before him, Streuli anonymously takes pictures of ordinary people on the street, as above. But instead of seeking out gritty ghettos or showpiece locations in New York or Paris, Streuli’s stamping grounds are the mundane, almost Identikit streets of commercialised cities across the world: Guangzhou, São Paulo, Sydney, even Birmingham itself.

I was lucky enough to get a peek at the show as Streuli was fine-tuning its presentation. Up in the light-filled top space of the converted 19th-century neo-gothic school are a selection of his street snaps, blown up to the size of billboard posters and pasted on the walls. Girls in vest tops give way to mothers in hijabs and men in baseball caps, shots that could have been taken in different cities or just outside the door. This is our globalised, migratory world writ large, with apparently scant differences in our environments.

Streuli describes himself as an artist who takes photographs, rather than a photographer, and the distinction is subtle but telling. Rather than focusing on the integral drama of the individual pictures, there is a delicate, fragmentary quality to his depiction of our public lives.

His subjects don’t stare into the camera, but rather look down or away from each other, introverted souls, lost in their own thoughts, or trying to block out the city around them with mobile phones or sunglasses, carving out tiny moments of isolation.

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There’s a brilliant ambiguity to Streuli’s work, opaquely reflecting the mundane reality of modern urban life as well as drawing out the microscopic differences that make up our cities – the way the light falls on a car windscreen or the sound of bus wheels on tarmac – and how vulnerable and human we all seem within them.

It might be less glamorous than life as a catwalk, but it is one of those resonant exhibitions that lends you the artist’s eyes long after you have left the gallery. It’s also another triumph for the Ikon, one of the best galleries in the country.